


The Wrong Kind of Stone

by lemonsharks



Series: Every Terrible, Necessary Choice [6]
Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Angst, Big Sisters, Blue Hawke, Canon-Typical Violence, Custom Hawke, Dysfunctional Family, Dysfunctional Relationships, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, F/M, Goodbyes, Hurt, Hurt/Comfort, Kirkwall and the consequences of Kirkwall, Mages, Memories, Nightmares, Organized Crime, Peril, Pining, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Siblings, Starting Over, The Fade, Travel, Unresolved Tension, act three, apparently I am writing The Godfather of Tevinter now, competent!bethany, mostly emotional hurt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-06
Updated: 2015-07-16
Packaged: 2018-03-28 22:48:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3872656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemonsharks/pseuds/lemonsharks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Falling in love with Anders was always a terrible idea.</p><p>Chapter 5: Hawke willed away the dread that <em>this</em> choice would be the one that brought them all to ruin. </p><p>(The emotional consequences of Kirkwall finally start catching up to Our Heroes.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Calm Parting, Still Air

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If she turned around and went back to Kirkwall now, would the city welcome her? Would they settle her throat on the block and make her oldest friend strike the killing blow? Would she even still merit a swordsman for her executioner? Or would a blunt axe have to do for the treachery of mercy she'd committed?

They ran out of land in Antiva. 

The whole country had carried the smell of life and decay, rich earth and new crops and the dung of the sheep and goats and cattle that ranged the flat, grass-covered plains. Jona Hawke thought for a moment that she'd look up the assassin they'd encountered months before, cash out the goodwill for a few weeks of extra protection. 

Then she thought better. Perhaps Zevran no longer traded on the particular skills that brought him to her attention. Perhaps a man with a price would always _listen_ to a higher bid--even if he rejected it in the end. 

Merrill turned east two days before they reached the Venefication Sea, bright blue and warm. It teamed with living things the likes of which simply did not think about settling down raising small rafts of mussels or barnacles on the pilings at the Kirkwall docks. Hawke had never seen a place less filthy than the glass-clear waves and the blinding white sand on the edge of the forest that called her friend away. 

They were down to three the day they reached the edge of Antiva and went west, as they'd always planned. A packed-dirt track ran along the cliff side a quarter mile inland. Anders trailed fifty yards or so behind; Jona walked just ahead of her sister, sword loose in its scabbard and shield already on her arm. 

No one came for them. Justice kept his peace. Jona knew he wouldn't always, and didn't press their luck. Such as it was.

The party camped late and rose early, sheltering beneath the broad-limbed beach willows and not, particularly, attempting to keep the damp from collecting on their things. A mist rose up from the sea two or three hours before sunrise. The damp had become very much a companion on this leg of the trip, and it brought mildew with it. _When we settle_ , she thought, _when we find a place we won't be chased, I'm going to wash every piece of clothing we own til my hands bleed from the lye._

For now, while they traveled, she didn't let herself dwell on the dread that lived at the base of her skull. On the chill on the back of her neck. But she knew, she knew. They might never find a place wild enough, distant enough, quiet and small and un-ruled. And they would have to choose, when they settled, between the Chantry and the Qun. 

Jona would sooner turn return Anders and her sister to the Circle herself than see them treated as _Saarebas_. Lips sewn shut, eyes sewn shut, their very selves stripped from them for their power. Bethany, at least, could talk her way back in. Argue circumstance for her flight. Anders would choose death before tranquility. 

She woke to the dream of a brand and the first cackling calls of the sea birds, Anders glowing beside her in the half-light. Jona let him sleep and went to bury the remains of last night's fire. 

Bethany was already awake. She carried their full water-skins over both shoulders, and net bag full of slightly under-ripe plums in one hand. She'd left her staff behind--

\--What if she'd been attacked?--

\--But she hadn't; they'd had precious little trouble since they parted ways with Fenris and Isabela on the docks outside Ostwick. _Bethany can take care of herself. She can crush a man with nothing but her mind._

Mother would've been so proud of her, and Father would have been utterly horrified. 

"You shouldn't go out wandering with no way to defend yourself, little sister," Jona said. Malcolm Hawke's voice whispered in her ear. _Take care of them, keep them safe. I'll be counting on you._

Bethany ignored her warning and handed over one of the riper plums. She dropped the bag with their provisions, and started striking her part of the camp. 

Quiet and efficient and thoughtful, as she had been on the passage to Gwaren in those days after the Witch left them to their own fate. Safe enough from the horde, and too much a distraction from the "things" she needed to do back in her home. Nothing but a smirk and a cloud of ash for her goodbye.

"I'll be leaving you in Minrathous," Bethany said, strapping her bedroll to her pack. "And there are a couple of gulls' nests with eggs, still, if we want to get some before we start off. Your choice."

"You can't just drop that kind of an announcement and then go off about eggs!" Jona hissed. She wished they bought a horse and cart when they had the coin for it; she would like very much to put something large and easily frightened between herself and her sister right now. It would force her to--to breathe, to calm, to stay her fear. 

The mist clung to her skin in a film. They moved faster without a cart. 

"Do you want me to apologize? I won't. It's as good a choice as any we can make, you know."

"You think you'll last ten minutes in Tevinter?"

"You think I'm so useless I won't? Nobody's going to notice one more mage. And they have a whole industry there, people like me, who build their entire lives making ice for the magisters' kitchens. I might do that while I ... "

_Think of something better._

Bethany shrugged. She pulled an oil-soaked cloth from a pocket on the side of her pack, and rubbed down the metal parts of her staff. Blade at the top. Mace head at the bottom. When she ran out of magical energy or lyrium or both she could still break an attacker's skull, and she knew how.

Four months since she'd had the dust of Kirkwall's Chantry in her lungs, and Jona still hadn't the faintest idea what better they might aspire to.

 _We'll think of something_ , she'd said to Aveline. The guard hadn't believed her and hadn't needed to say as much aloud. 

That something she was supposed to think of hadn't come up yet. 

"They make slaves out of mages too, _you know_ ," Jona whispered. 

"I won't get myself into debt, then. I won't gamble, and I'll be careful to stay indoors after dark. Once you're out of Tevinter, the two of you are safer without me, anyway."

Bethany tucked the cloth away again, and swung her staff in a couple of swift arcs that could have liberated a man's head from his body. Were she so inclined. The air itself smelled of burnt thyme and smoking oil, as it often did when Bethany worked her sorcery. 

The words formed just beneath her tongue, _Let's make a game of it, a duel. If I can disarm you, you'll stay with us so far as the Anderfels. If I can't, I'll let you go without a fuss._

She wrapped her hand around the hilt of the Arishok's sword, the wire and leather wrappings familiar now after so many years of faithful service. She could feel Meredith's blood in the blade, though her baby sister had landed the killing blow. Had conjured the stone from the ground that snapped the Knight-Commander's neck. 

Jona's challenge died in her throat. All she wanted was Bethany, ten, to spring into her room far too early and beg that Jona braid her hair. _I can't do it backwards, please, will you?_

"You're the only family I have left," she said. 

"Am I?"

Anders stirred, then, but didn't wake. He scarcely slept at all. More often, he volunteered to take first watch and _stayed_ awake til Jona or Bethany got up of their own volition. 

At some point this morning he'd regained his ordinary complexion, skin no longer crackling. For a few moments just before they hid the final signs of their camp and left, he would have peace. As Justice had turned to Vengeance, she wondered how long they had til Vengeance turned to Wrath. Could spirits change into demons? 

Her sister might have given her the answer, if she would ask. She had six years in the Circle and all the answers their father had denied them all that time ago. Anders himself might know, but she'd given her ultimatum and he'd agreed to it. 

_We are finished here--with rebellion, with violence, with the mage underground and with affecting huge, sweeping change in the world. If you want me in your life now, you must agree that that portion of your life is over. The rest we'll face when we must._

And Jona had agreed she would bring up nothing from that chapter of his life.

Bethany was her only blood-kin, outside of Gamlen and Charade, outside of whatever cousinage Malcolm Hawke had kept from them or had not known about himself. The only kin that knew her, the only kind that mattered.

"You know the kind I mean," she said, at last.

Anders yawned. Jona turned from her sister and started packing the few remaining things that they'd left out. He inched from their bedroll, stood with a stretch, and touched the back of her head by way of greeting on his way to attend morning business. As he always did. 

When Anders had realized he was _allowed_ touch, permitted the warmth of her skin for his own, he had reveled in the privilege. It took him the better part of that first year, when she ached for the loss of her mother and he hadn't even the beginning of a theory on how to offer succor for that wound. 

_We'll need to divide up the supplies and the rest of the coin, when we reach Minrathous_ , Jona thought. 

The practicality stilled her mind.The tin pot and plates clanged against one another when she stacked them. 

If she turned around and went back to Kirkwall now, would the city welcome her? Would they settle her throat on the block and make her oldest friend strike the killing blow? Would she even still merit a swordsman for her executioner? Or would a blunt axe have to do for the treachery of mercy she'd committed?

"You should've woken me up," Anders said, now returned. He shook the sand out of their bedroll and folded it precisely, all sharp corners and neat edges he'd learned as a Warden and never discarded.

"I'll wake you early when you've slept every night for a week," she replied. Then, "Bethany found some gulls' eggs and plums this morning. Apparently we have to do some rock-climbing if we want the former."

Behind them, the sun crested over water, and began to burn away the fog. 


	2. Empty Glasses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hawke finds herself accidentally settling in to Minrathous. It's like that first year in Kirkwall all over again, only she can't read more than a road-sign and doesn't understand nine spoken words out of ten.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies (sorry-not-sorry) for the google translate Latin. Mea culpa, mea culpa. (Hover over it for a translation.)

She had, of course, heard stories of Minrathous. 

Fenris in his cups called it a roiling place, dead with the magic baked in its limestone city walls. He had said that the ordinary people inched along the edges of the streets, of their own lives, keeping the way clear for litters and divans and the processions of magisters and their guards and their slaves. Those men who were cowards, who hid even from the day itself. Who wielded in their cowardice all the power of the old Imperium.

"You can taste _them_ in the water," he'd said once, in the dark place between a joke and a reminisce. "And everyone else. It's bitter. Poisoned."

Jona hadn't liked the elf at all then, though she trusted him, and trust meant family more--as much as--blood ever did. She'd placed a glass of boiled Kirkwall water by his bedside when she left him for the evening. 

_Anders_ put all of his poetry into spinning yarns of a place he'd never seen, never been, of stories printed in books in a language he couldn't, didn't read. _Didn't read_ well, he'd corrected at the time. "They teach you Tevene in the Circle, but it never stuck with me. I might have gotten out sooner if I paid more attention to it. Tevinter spells are stronger than most of ours."

When they arrived, it was neither a white city nor a black one, but as with all the things she did somewhere in-between. It was choked with the dust of yellow mortar and crumbling cement and men and women buying and selling and tearing down and building on top of the ruin left behind by their forebears.

The thrown-open gates reminded her of Kirkwall, and not-Kirkwall; they reminded her of the low stone barricade around most of Lothering, the harbor chain protecting Gwaren from attack by sea.

"How much Tevene do you actually know?" she asked Anders, then, as she craned her neck and took in a sliver of the gate.

" _Plus quam tu, me minus_ ," Bethany replied. 

"I believe she just said she's a wretched show-off," Anders said with fondness. 

" _You_ wouldn't have me any other way."

"No one ever smacked her for being pert as a child, did they?"

"Not Bethany," Hawke said. "She got _talkings-to_."

The crowd shoved them forward. As good a reason as any to get moving.

Hawke sheathed her sword and settled her shield at her back. She sauntered in with Bethany at her right hand and Anders at her left, and the world did not rumble beneath them. The gate attendant only noted something about from whence they'd come. 

After he spoke, Bethany repeated his words, "He said we sound like Kirkwall, and that they've had too many of those the last month or so. But he'll put down Ostwick if we're certain we're telling the truth." 

"We're certain," Hawke said. Smiled. Nodded. Pulled open the strings of her purse.

She knew this routine. She'd played this part in this routine before.

The portage fees were listed up on a sign above this petty bureaucrat’s head, in Tevene and the common tongue below, with hashes and painted coins to the side for the illiterate. The man adjusted his draping garment on one shoulder. His fingers buzzed with magic when she touched him, sliding a stack of coins across the table between them. She placed two sovereigns at the bottom, which disappeared.

"Ostwick," the porter said, in a round, sonorous accent Hawke wouldn't stay long enough to get used to. He gave them back a smile and a nod and a wave into the city.

No one else remarked upon their entry. 

"' _Sounding like Kirkwallers_ ' was not all he said," Anders murmured as they passed.

"I am not translating _all he said_ ," Bethany replied.

  
  


There was a time when the Champion of Kirkwall could have traded on her name. 

Maybe she still could have, here as she didn't dare try in the Free Marches. 

Maybe killing the Arishok still counted for something here. Maybe it counted for more than picking up the hourglass that had been the Templar order, and hurling it against the wall rather than flip it over for another round. 

Maybe that meant more here than it had back home.

You couldn't tell slave from freeman most times. Few wore iron collars or iron shackles, but when you went to meet a man's eyes not all of them would. Fewer of those had been draped with precious stones and metals, dressed up in finely-woven, clean linen. Those walked close to the men who owned them like ornamented pets, and those men dressed in silk and stank of perfume and volatile oils.

"I say we find a room in the shitty part of town," Hawke said. 

  
  


The shitty part of town, it turned out, was situated in the northernmost part of the city. The containing wall arced inland, away from the sea. The sewage that had been collected from throughout Minrathous was hauled out into the fields surrounding it through the northern gate. The Imperial Highway veered around those fields, rather than cutting through them. You could get a bed and a door that closed for ten silver a night outside the wall and twenty inside it. 

Hawke paid a sovereign for a bath, a door that locked and the innkeeper's discretion.

"You two could stay," Bethany said that night, over wine and a dish of dumplings in a squid-ink sauce. 

They'd taken a corner table in the taproom, close to the back door with a view of all the other entrances and exits. Hawke shuffled a deck of cards but never dealt, debating whether they'd replenish their coffers faster running a confidence game or doing honest work. Or as honest as any of the work they ever did. 

Anders rested one hand on her knee beneath the table, watching the other patrons with eyes blazing fade-blue beneath their usual ruddy hazel. 

So many folk carried a mage's staff openly here. 

One woman had hung hers with pouches, tiny ones, bigger ones, ones the size of the pomelos sold in the green market. She produced a coin from one and a set of cutlery from another and dug in to her supper with enthusiasm. A man near the door took his son by the back of the neck and steered him in a straight line up the stairs, on the opposite side of the room from Hawke's table. The lad's sister played with the glowing illusion of a string-game between her fingers, following behind them without seeing where she put her feet. 

Jona stabbed a dumpling off Bethany's plate with the tip of her knife; she'd had bread and cheese and olives herself. Too hot to eat hot food when they'd come down.

"We could build a life here," Anders said. 

He sounded hopeful, for the first time since they'd left Kirkwall. Like he believed in the possibility of a world that didn't want him in a cage. The air changed, a tiny cell around their table; static raised the hair on Jona's arms and sent a frisson down her spine. 

Bethany finished her wine and took Jona's glass. 

"This is the first place they'll come looking for us," Jona said.

"And the Chantry will find the fight of their lifetime waiting if they do."

Nobody seemed to notice the ragged edge on his voice, the light in his eyes, beneath his nails, in the lines that framed his mouth. Jona took Anders' hand and squeezed, twined their fingers, stroked the pad of her thumb up and down the length of his. 

She didn't shush. 

"We'll fight if we have to," she said. "But I'd sooner run than fight. Though we do need to stay a while and earn a bit of money, if nothing else. Everything you've said about the Anderfels makes me think opportunities aren't exactly thick on the ground where we're going."

He calmed, not entirely but _enough_ , and she wondered whether it was too late to turn around and find a little valley in Rivain, instead. 

  
  


It was like that first year all over again—they found the least-shifty-looking smugglers in a twelve-block radius, and Jona sold them them her sword. Lyrium wasn't controlled by the Chantry here; mages walked the streets, muttering lists and tasks and place-names like ordinary people, and almost every one had a glowing blue flask or seven clipped to their belt. 

No, the lyrium was not controlled by the Chantry, but it was inspected and taxed by the city, and kept almost entirely out of laymen's hands. 

And with the city looking for its cut, came the businessmen looking to dodge the city, came the customers looking to buy just a little cheaper, came the need for guards and transport and all the shadow-cloaked bureaucracy that sprang up with employ for the likes of Jona Hawke and hers. 

Her boss this time around was a man named Iulius, who offered to slake her thirst with a cup of the blue her first night. 

"All my apologies, Lord, but I know how this goes. You drink one day; you're sick for two. You use the stuff for a month and you're in bed wishing your insides would boil away for a season. I've been there. I'd as soon not go back."

Thrask had taught her a few of his Templar tricks, and she hadn't used them since the Arishok. The weeks afterward, when Kirkwall had burned and kept burning, when you couldn't buy or steal a Lyrium flask to save yourself, those were easily the worst weeks of her life. 

Iulius shrugged. Muttered that it was her loss, and settled a battered helm on his head. 

He was a puffy, sun-browned sort of man, with round deep-set eyes and hands that could crush your bones if you let him get ahold of them. Big. Older and slower than he would've been in years past, but wilier than you. He'd come from the very southern end of Tevinter, and he spoke Orlesian and the common tongue as well he did Tevene, and that first night he paid her very well for roughing up a couple of idiots who thought it was a good plan to sell their wares in _his_ boss's territory.

After a particularly successful round a few weeks later, he'd taken her home to meet his wife and family. He liked her, and she liked being liked—liked having people, finding them, gathering them close around her. Jona took his youngest boy on her lap and tried explaining how to say her name for half an hour, his siblings and mother giggling the entire time. _Iona, Yona, Dona_ ; he never quite got the first sound, and it was well past his bedtime when she strolled back home. 

He was a very nice child; they all were. And Flavia was a very kind woman, who spoke to Jona in the language of bread and salt, where they shared no words at all. 

_We could make a home here._

Some nights Jona sat awake by the fire and wrote home, wrote to Varric or Aveline or Fenris, the words scrawled out before her, _I have done things I regret. I've come to a place I swore I'd never revisit._ She shredded the paper each time and used it for kindling. 

  
  


Anders found her like that after they'd been in Minrathous three months. 

They'd taken a second room at the inn, and he'd started seeing patients there. This time he charged for his skill. Men and women who needed patching up but didn't want their spouses to know what they'd been up to paid, as so many people did, for service with a politely-turned head. Bethany found work in a forge, center-city. It was faster for a mage to heat the iron rods destined for nails or horseshoes than a boy with a bellows, and you could spell them for long wear and strength while you worked. All told, Jona could be in or out at any give hour, lazing in the taproom or knocked unconscious in her bed at noon or midnight. It all depended what time Iulius came calling for her. 

There wasn't a last call so much as the hour where the barman locked the liquor away and went to bed, usually a bit before dawn. He shouted, _I'm going to sleep_!, and his warning echoed against the mostly-empty room in the two languages he spoke. Jona regarded her cup, thick beer warmed to the ambient, sticky-damp temperature of the room and almost gone, and she tossed the dregs back with a grimace. Not the ratpiss ale at the Hanged Man. A few degrees better in fact, but.

"It's not the ratpiss ale at the Hanged Man," she murmured for her own ears.

Anders found her with half a letter crumpled between her fingers and her eyes on the grainy-bottom of that empty cup. He dropped a many-times-folded broadsheet on the table in front of her. 

Their table. Their people sitting 'round it, and not-their-people moving when they realized it had long been claimed. Sometimes Jona brought Iulius; sometimes Bethany dragged one of the smiths home with her before disappearing Maker-knew-where; Anders had never yet returned from the room that served as his clinic with a hanger-on. _He_ scarcely left this building. 

Jona unfolded the sheet, tearing it down the middle accidentally. She lined the text up again as best she could, though she couldn't read more than a road sign and didn't understand nine spoken words of ten. 

Some Minrathan lunatic had figured out moving type, and another one how to make paper thin as silk and a thousand times more flimsy. The business of distributing the news had sprung up less than twenty years ago, and nobody was, from what she gathered, quite sure how it might yet change the worlds of business, of magic, of faith. 

A slapdash engraving of her face, and another of his in profile, took up a quarter page beside a fierce-looking block-print headline. The words beneath bent and blurred with aging metal type; a poorer paper, then. A paper that meant to make its fortune writing about the hill she would die on. 

He took a steadying breath and splayed his fingers, stretching the webbing taut between each one, as he often did in silent argument with the spirit camped out in his flesh. Jona touched the broadsheet, and wished her sister were here now. But Bethany had dug her fingers into life here, building up her own world as Hawke had done in Kirkwall, and she kept some of her people to herself. 

Even without Bethany, she knew the word for _Kirkwall_ , and she knew the word for _war_ , and she knew how an artist could make his living instilling the fear of those who might destroy in those around him.

Jona Hawke's own picture glared back at her, ripped through the forehead, and angry. 

Anders dropped into the seat beside her, and said, "We have a problem."


	3. Ravens in the Rafters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Someone is disrupting the lyrium trade in Tevinter, and one of Hawke's debtors clears an account that she had not realized was in the red.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mm, more google translate Latin. More apologies for it.

Hawke did not sleep that night.

 _The Templar order makes war against mages, and war that will surely come to Tevinter._ That was the gist of it. 

She didn't know what the magisters and their like thought, but the ordinary people worried. Half a year, two hundred days in sand between her fingers and blood behind her eyes, since Kirkwall took the last she had to give. A whole lot of things could snap and crumble in six months, in seven.

She failed to sleep more often than she didn't, woke sticky with fear-sweat when she did. She didn't _remember_ the last time she'd seen her sister, and Anders... . 

Pretended. Held onto each day they stayed like all his joy might vanish at any moment. Mocked and joked in the taproom and usually, usually kept Justice tamped down. Healing, helping enough that the spirit didn't rise. 

"I can usually tell when someone is complaining about their work or their mother," he had said, one night, pointing from conversation to conversation around the taproom. "Work. Work. Mother. Work. Cuckolded. Or cheated in a business deal, I can't tell which."

He was better with diseases.

She tucked the broadsheet into her shirt and left the inn early the next morning. Jona wrapped her head in a cloth, obscuring the lower half of her face. The paper itched against her skin; the ink stained it. Iulius told her, when she met him outside the Via Parum gate, that she looked like hell.

Hawke drew her sword in a sweeping arc, smiling, and said, "I can still fight like it, too. Want to see?"

False ease, easy friendship—the face she wore was the face Donnic once said could make her Viscount, after he and Aveline returned from Orlais and stopped by the estate to say hello. The atmosphere had snapped with the happiness around them, and Aveline looked at her for a handful of seconds and hugged her closer than Leandra ever had. The pair stayed well into that evening, talking over drinks and later dinner, and when they went home to the apartments allotted them Hawke had leaned against the door and not-cried, though the air shuddered in her lungs.

People trusted the face that could have made her Viscount.

Iulius drew his daggers, his mouth straining against a grin. One moment he was before her, then behind her. Hawke spun away when one blade caught her forearm, skidded and bounced off a wall. The others had formed a circle around them; she freed her shield, caught Iulius in the chest with it, lay the flat point of the Arishok's blade against the dip of his throat. 

Iulius froze and dropped his knives, pressed back against the limestone city wall. The guards posted in this part of Minrathous only really cared that no one got in who shouldn't, not what you did to your fellow-man outside their jurisdiction. She winked over the length of her blade, and his grin broke. A laugh bubbled out of Hawke's mouth, too—exhaustion talking—and she settled back. Sheathed the sword. Picked up her boss's weapons and returned them.

"Crazy bitch," he said, clapping her on the shoulder, smiling.

"I can work tired as well as I can fresh," she said. "In case you forgot."

"Keep that up and I'll have to kill you, girl. Or make you my second in a year or two, I'm not sure which."

She hummed, and dipped into what would've been a theatrical curtsy if she had been wearing skirts. She considered extending that she was no girl, hadn't been for a long time—thirty-four with no children and no home and not even a _dog_ to her name, well. She hadn’t been hired to stand around acting maudlin.

Iulius shouted for their carter to drive, damn him, and they set off. Six mercenary thugs and ten kegs of liquid lyrium, bound for Somewhere Else. 

They went quiet—they had forged paperwork declaring some strong beer, specially made, though nobody had spoken with the city and no tax had been paid on the goods or the transaction. "An oversight, in haste," Iulius would say, as he offered their apology with that trick he did where be blushed on command, turning his round face florid. "Let us take care of the fee and the fine right here and now—you'll take it back to the central office, yes?"

Jona had seen it happen and she'd learned more about bribery in the last six weeks than she had in all her years in Kirkwall, despite greasing no few palms herself. Her petty crime as workmanlike; Iulius turned scamming into art. 

"Whose job _is_ this, anyway?" she asked, in a place where the others had quieted down some.

"Man call's himself Sam," Iulius said. "He's new around, but he's new with good coin and plenty of work, so. Ennio recommended us to him, and Crassius has done work with him before. Not much. But he says he pays on time and without complaint if the job's done and there aren't too many bodies left over."

"Mmm, but he's not Tevene, is he?"

" _You_ aren't, either. Your coin still bends when it's bit."

"Point."

She took her peace, and he turned away, picked up another line of conversation with their people. Marco trailed behind Iulius, talking to the back of his head. Decima followed yards behind the wagon, occasionally raising her voice in the strain of a slightly off-key song, too fast or too slow for Hawke to parse the words. The air spun around Decima's staff, a spell half-prepared in the back of her throat, and Hawke was for a moment acutely reminded of Fenris, of the people he would strike down in righteous fury. 

She hadn't been asked to help transport human, elven flesh—yet. 

They turned off the stone-paved Via Parum and onto a dirt track six miles out, where the fields gave over to pasturage and the pasturage gave over to spindly woodland. The sun warmed her head beneath her cowl, and she pushed it away to rest on her shoulders.

Her hair covered her ears and brushed her neck; she'd grown it out when Bethany went to the Circle, and she thought perhaps it was time to submit to the climate and hack it all off again. The strength of the daylight here had turned her hair more golden than brown, and her skin almost brown-enough to blend in. Anders and Bethany just burned. 

She turned to Iulius, when his conversation with Marco ended and a few moments passed with just the cart-wheels turning and their druffalo's plodding steps. 

"You hear anything about a war down south?"

Marco answered her. "There's rumblings. Occupation, Blight, civil war—you bastards are always trying to kill each other. You _make_ reasons where there aren't any."

"This time," she said, quietly, testing. She trusted him as well but, as it turned out, not enough to tell the whole story. "Someone attacked the Chantry. Destroyed the temple in Kirkwall."

Iulius paused for a moment, considered her from the corner of his eye. His eldest daughter was a mage, fifteen years old. She spun her spells with a staff and a flute that could lift even the darkest mood, when she wasn't working in an ice-house by the springs.

"Good riddance to them," Iulius said, and made a dismissive sound in his throat. "Churchmen playing at law, playing at rule. Keeping soldiers. I'm surprised it took _this_ long."

"The southern mages, they—" Jona stopped. She hadn't stayed long enough to learn the _what_ they did, after Meredith was dead. Rebelled. _Motus.  Rebellatio_. Words from the broadsheet itched against her skin. "Good people died."

Marco said, "Good people die every day. We kill 'em ourselves all the Blighted time. Mages finally realize they don't have to stay locked up in their Circles, good for them. Finally realize they can make a force of themselves together? It was going to happen sooner or later, and it happened in our lifetime in the Marches and Orlais and Ferelden. Happened centuries ago here. We won't see a war in Tevinter. All we'll see's more customers. More people, coming to _here_ from where there's war. I'll put ten sovereigns on it now."

"Witnessed," Decima said. She'd walked up beside them and cracked her staff against a stone.

Hawke laughed, but where pleasure used to live was a pit in her chest. She shook her belt-purse, jangling with silver and copper, accepting a bet she couldn't pay for if she lost. The others kept talking without her.

She thought of Anders, back at the clinic, the destruction he had wrought with hands that built a sanctum of peace, of healing. If they'd met a year before they did—if he'd slipped from the Circle at Kinloch Hold before the Blight, rather than in the middle of it, if he'd gone south instead of east.

 _No Justice, no Vengeance, no Wrath._

_If-if-if._

The spirit dwelt closer to the surface of him, now—touchy, discontent, for every day, every moment he attempted happiness. Some days he slept from dusk til dusk, Justice roaming the Fade. Did spirits feel tiredness as people did? Could they? But after those days Anders was looser, quicker to smile. 

She wished some nights that she might demand an audience with Justice, that she could create the chance to speak her piece to that corrupting force. Wished on others that Anders would so much as touch her as he once had, with ardor that reeled and consumed, more flood than flame. She'd been cut loose to wash up on these wretched, white-sand shores. On the mornings that followed them she couldn't even try forgetting every other problem that they had.

No citizenship, for one. Not for her, not for him; their very presence here was criminal. Someday they'd run out of luck, and then—

The city or a hired blade or a slaver she couldn't run through fast enough would seize _their_ chance, _their_ fortune. _Levis est fortunae domina._ Less dependable than Andraste, more likely to kick you while you lay there bleeding than the Maker. Not a god, _per se_ , or perhaps more of one than the shadow of the Old Gods.

"Hawke," Iulius said, stealing her reverie. They'd reached the last bend in this road. "Scout ahead and report back. Any more than six men waiting for us and we turn our asses around and take up our second-choice buyer instead, hear?"

  
  


The exchange went well. The product was sampled, and coin of providence in the proper amount was exchanged. Hawke trailed the others into the city. It was her job, on the trip back today, to ensure no one overtook them on the road, no one they'd missed on the way out profited off their dealings through force or trickery. 

No one did. Iulius told them all to be at the Cracked Cup by the docks at ten that evening, where they'd celebrate an easy transaction well-made and where their cut of the proceedings would be divided. First he was going to see his boss, and his boss's boss, to report and hand over the bulk of the gold. 

She got back to the Via Parum gate last of all, and idled over a strong drink in the inn for a while before she headed to their rented room, stripped off her shoes and her shirt and collapsed in a heap on her unmade bed. Never thought she'd miss the old Amell estate. Bethany always loved it more than her, though she'd only spent two nights there, before they ran. 

The sheets here smelled of sweat and a little of mold rather than lavender and sage, and she really ought to pick up a bag of dried orange rinds for the brazier, to keep the mosquitoes at bay. If they even wanted to burn anything in the insufferable heat. 

Jona woke hours later, not rested, the bed still warm from where Anders had joined her for a while and then left. She glanced around for any kind of note, and pulled the damp, crumpled broadsheet from where it had raised a rash on her chest. 

Night had fallen, and Bethany did not occupy the cot on the other side of the room. More often now she went home with one of her smiths, the son of the forge's owner, courting not a husband but a sponsor. The man was no _altus_ , but the forge had standing enough to claim a foreign mage or two in their debt. 

Jona scribbled a note and left it on her sister's pillow, _We may need to leave in a hurry. Please stay here for a few days, I'd like to see you._

She changed her smalls and her socks and found a cleaner shirt than the one she'd worn out today, wished the room had come with a mirror as she wet her hands in the basin and finger-combed her hair. 

Anders's voice echoed down the hallway, scolding. He broke from Tevene with a rumble, "—I ought to refuse you for your own stupidity, leaving a three-year-old alone with an open fire—" The child in question wailed, and Anders quieted, and there were muffled voices from behind the closed door, and then Justice, " _RELINQUITE!_ Both of you! Now!" and another round of muttering, and a moment later the man and woman who were the parents in question shuffled from the room.

Jona lingered in the hallway, listening, pretending to fight with the lock on her own door. The man held tight to the back of the woman's neck, keeping her from the room; her face was red and wet. His was screwed tight, wrinkles deep-set between his eyes. The spoke in low tones, and Jona caught the word for _demon_ , for _wrong_ , for _danger_ , and thought she might have to come intervene.

The child kept wailing—fear, with a good deal of pain besides. Hawke let go of the door with its imprint on her palm when Anders spoke next, himself again. "I'll make the hurt stop if you'll show me where it's worst. Can you do that, little bee? _Ubi facies contra? Vulnero? Vulner...ae? Tevenus malum me—sum—suum?_ Ah, never mind. _Malum me, malum_ _me._ "

The wailing stopped, replaced with a tentative giggle, and the hiss and chill of healing magic nearby.

Jona didn't look at the burned girl's parents as she passed them. She would have liked to have ducked her head into cracked-open the clinic door, let Anders know where she was headed and that she'd likely not be back before morning. A small voice from within the clinic said, " _Verum ita est!_ "

"Yes, very much," he replied, "Now let me see that foot. _Pede? Peditum?_ Ah, well, at least you're laughing, even if it's at me…"

Nighttime sucked in close around her skin. On a Friday night, a rest-day's-eve, most of Minrathous was out cavorting in the streets. Jona jostled in the crowd of them, and let the flesh of people who would never be her countrymen swallow her up. 

The Cracked Cup was _so clean_ that you _doubted_ its respectability. The barman and the muscle on the floor kept the place from ever getting too raucous, and when it closed down for the night it was scrubbed over in beach-sand and orange blossom water. The beer was very good and the food consistently did not make you sick.

Each of the rooms on the second and third floor came with clean linen, a set-spell against buzzing insects that activated with a touch, and a hipbath of steaming water scented with rosemary. A different sort of philander, a higher kind of criminal, met with their people here. This was the place _legitimate_ ships' captains and owners bedded down after their journeying.

Jona had tried out-drinking Marco exactly once and woken in one of the rooms. It was the first, last, and only time she would ever attempt that sort of thing with a man who had a foot of height and a solid five stone of muscle on her. The next morning, she'd fought her own throat for a sound with Marco leaning over her. Bethany and Anders had hovered in the doorway, present on Iulius's sufferance. The light had hurt, as she'd known it would when her eyes began to swim. 

The liquor here went down smooth and snuck up on you when you tried standing. 

All the ambiance and a little more than half the snobbery of a Hightown public house right here in Minrathous. The man who employed the man who employed Iulius, a proper magister from what Jona could gather, used this place to launder his money. She wondered idly whether it came out smelling of oranges, as she pushed open the door and greeted the Friday night guard, stated her party and followed his gesture through to a spacious room in the back. 

"Time?" she asked, glancing back over her shoulder at him. "Ah, shit—"

And the Tevene for what she wanted to say was there, just as suddenly, on her tongue. She wobbled in the middle of it, shaping her mouth around it, and the guard answered and then shook his hand as if he meant, _so-so_ , a little before or after _._ Jona grinned and spoke the words again beneath her breath, letting them form behind her teeth, mimicking a version of the accent she'd heard most often since coming here. It felt good to know, even if she'd never need the words again after she left.

She was not the first to arrive, nor the last, and she talked with Iulius a while about the job, how it had gone, how it might go better or worse another time. 

Jona said, "This customer was at least honest, but we can't count on that every time. I expected a trap from the moment we turned off the Via Parum. Well, or he's a bastard in a different kind of way. Couldn't tell—did he give a name at all?"

"He didn't. He also offered more than he should've, straight away. No negotiating. I probably could've taken him further, charged enough to be a cheat, but—" Iulius spoke a phrase in Orlesian, and then repeated for her benefit. "Ninety-nine sovereigns and a demon's address. I heard _Ennio_ passed up this same buyer a few weeks back, that our man Sam dug him up."

"This is the kind of deal where your greed makes you act foolishly," she replied. "Where you can't decide if it's too good to be true or not."

"Makes you take risks you wouldn't, otherwise. I want to speak with Ennio. You should go along with me—we'll see if there's anything to worry over, then. But come!" And he looked around the room, lingering on each face for a moment. All of their company from this morning, including the carter, and Marco had brought a pretty young woman who leaned on a staff set with opals. "We'll get payment settled first, and then we celebrate a nice, simple job!"

Iulius told them the full take, the portion that was given over to his boss, the portion he kept for himself for running the thing, and for doing the work on the streets, keeping order, _et cetera, et cetera_. Each of them took their share, ordered by the length of their tenure with the organization. Jona counted out her coin fourth, before the carter and the lad Iulius thought to bring in and train up a couple of weeks back.

More food and better wine arrived, and toasts were made, thanks given. The carter left with his money, and Marco's mage-girl kissed him wetly behind the ear and led him out by the wrist to whoops and whistles from the rest of them. 

Jona ate and drank and diced; she told a story or two of the years she spent in Lowtown, speaking to the group with hands and eyes and posture while Iulius echoed her in Tevene, the chorus in a play. They laughed where she joked, where Iulius made her funnier than she was; in the middle of one story Decima curled over the table gasping for breath, with tears in her eyes. Jona thought, _Aveline, forgive me, but you_ were _at the center of the funniest damn thing that happened all ten years I was in Kirkwall_. 

Sated and warm from the night and the pay and the liquor, they filed out one-by-one. The Cracked Cup didn't have a final call; when it got late, a well-dressed gentleman approached each guest, found a natural break in conversation, and invited them to take a room for the night. When such a man reached their private chamber, Jona and Iulius were the last remaining.

"Varric would like you a great deal, I think," she said. "You're a scoundrel and a good man. C'mon, your home's on the way to mine and I'd as soon not not spend all my money in one place tonight. Begging Messere's pardon," she added, for the house's benefit. 

  
  


The Friday-night market in the square outside the Cup was still active, loud and lit with torches and cooking flames and mage-conjured glowing spheres, ephemeral in the damp. Hawke bought a couple of loaves of fried dough, flavored with garlic and cumin, to sop up the wine in her belly. She handed one to Iulius and the two of them walked on, no need for talk. 

From across the square, a young man called, "Ay, you! I'm talking to you!"

Lightning broke out across the sea; she doubted the storm would make its way inland and take the heat away, but on a night like this one Hawke indulged a little hope.

As the money ran out, the crowd thinned. 

Some of the streets would be well-guarded and teeming, every day and night, all year long. Those were further from the docks. _Some_ folk could afford to pay a purely decorative night-shift. Coiner's Row, where the moneychangers and the bankers set up shop, was paved in old Tevinter currency, halves and quarters and pieces of eight cut from the _denarii_ that hadn't been used since the Imperium collapsed under its own weight centuries ago. The Cracked Cup stood a couple of miles from the Row, and another three or four miles from the Piecework District, where Hawke lived. Piecework ended at the inland city wall. 

The sun would rise in two, maybe three hours, and by the time you got past the dough-road, where most of the city's grain came to be ground and mixed and formed into loaves, leaves, and noodles, you couldn't find a soul about. Iulius rented a little house close to there, not a true villa but made in the style of one. Jona knew the whitewashed walls and red clay-tile roof well by now, and the torch that would burn outside til he came home on any given night. 

Mice skittered by, close to the buildings, and tiny bats with wings translucent as wet silk fluttered overhead, snatching up the insects that gathered by the mage-made streetlamps. She heard footfalls of someone else making a late trek home, and a dog's bark a few streets over. She let the thing in her chest—the aching, missing thing—twist and release; Teryn had gone sleepy and gray around the muzzle, and Aveline loved the old mabari as much as she did. _He'd_ at least do better in Kirkwall than he would here.

Still. She hadn't had a baby puppy since her father brought them Teryn, and she'd felt his absence more than she had thought she would. _Where your dog lays his head is home_ , the proverb went. Maybe they'd find a farmstead on the edge of the world, or a small house in a less-terrible part of Minrathous, and Anders would very likely bring the mousers inside and the dog would, as Teryn often had, end up curled between their shins at night. 

They could live for a while more unsponsored, and magic ran strong in the Amell line. Funny, thinking of that as an asset, but it might just be their salvation. If they stayed.

Something scraped, steel on leather, and Jona froze, listening. Iulius got a couple steps further up the street before he, too, stopped in his track. Shuffling, a bow-string drawn tight above them, somewhere. No telling _where_.

He looked back at her. She hadn't brought her sword and shield, only the knife she used for eating hung from her belt. Iulius unsheathed both his daggers and tossed one of them to her. Jona was fumble-fingered with the dance and stab Isabela had tried at least twenty times to teach her, preferring instead a longsword’s reach and the brutishness of a shield in her opponent's face.

Two fighters half-armed were better than one defender and one damsel. Even if they were both still very close to drunk—better to run and regroup than stand to fight and die of their own stupid bravado.

Jona moved to Iulius's back, and they darted together into shadow. 

Moments passed. She relaxed enough to breathe while her blood sounded between her ears.

"We're closer to your place than the Cup," Iulius said. 

What he didn't say was, _We will not lead whomever drew a blade on us back to my family tonight._

"I know a couple of buildings we can slip through, come on—"

She took the vanguard, into a shadowed alley, shaded and hidden by an overgrown crystal grace vine. Iulius picked the lock she indicated, and a moment later they were inside, the door shut and locked again behind them. 

She looked around—somebody's back parlor, swords mounted on either side of the door. Flimsy ones, dull from disuse, but they would do. The someone who lived here lived above their means, sacrificed the maintenance of the house for the collection of the things inside it. Or rented from someone who didn't care about their property. You almost couldn't tell a slum-lord from an honest broker til you moved in and found a spider bigger than you were living inside the privy.

Jona took the better of the swords, returned Iulius's second blade, and tiptoed down into the cellar and up a stairwell and out into a different alley. She darted down, took them between buildings, beneath awnings, kept shadow between them and their pursuer, imagined or real.

No sunlight yet, not even close to it. Jona stopped again, and listened, Iulius beside her. One more bend would give them a straight shot, a sprint back home, and if they had Anders and Bethany, too— 

Iulius crumpled, an arrow in his throat, the wound stealing any sound he might make in his death. Jona went to her knees, went to _him_ , and the blood was all over, coloring the cement and soaking his clothes and hers, and then, then his eyes went glassy and he shook, shivered, his hands at his neck, and—

"Fuck," Jona whispered. 

She looked around, looked up. Nobody lurked in the night, and she called out, her Tevene gone and her common tongue clumsy, "Come out and face me! Coward, bastard, come and cross blades with the Champion of _fucking Kirkwall_!"

From a window, a woman's voice replied, "Shut up!"

Jona turned back to Iulius, pulled the arrow free, tried to staunch the bleeding, but there was nothing for it. He sputtered, and then he hadn't any breath left in him, just two minutes between living and not.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, please, I didn't mean this, _Maker_ —"

But the Maker wasn't here and the Maker wouldn't save her. 

Her hands shook, when she wiped them on her trousers, when she took two silver from her purse, drew Iulius's eyelids closed, lay a coin over each one. The least she could give him, when she couldn't even promise his corpse she'd tell his family herself. 

"I'm sorry," she repeated, a keen in her own throat, when she took his purse and added its contents to her own. Took his daggers and tucked them into her belt, and ran as she had not run in years. 

She passed buildings in a blur of white limestone and gray mortar, green-black vines, banners hanging out of windows and laundry drying on the line. Her chest _hurt_ , the tightness there a stabbing in her lungs. Jona _saw_ nothing, felt only the stones beneath her feet, and even those she did not _know._

This happened when she didn't have her friends beside her; whatever she did went to _shit_ when she tried going it alone. Jona found herself in the wrong side of Piecework, a mile off from where she ought to have been, and not sure how she'd got there. If she could get to the wall she could put that at her back. If she could get to the fountain in Tanner's Square she could hide in the center, a nook just big enough for a body, and wait the bastards out. If she could find a friend in a house—one of Bethany's new people, maybe—maybe _they_ would give her shelter—

—too many _ifs_ —

Hawke ran again, a straight line down the street that would take her home, and when she turned a corner her pursuers dropped from the roofs, twelve she could see, and surely others she couldn't.

A woman stepped forward, pulled the cowl off her face, and spat. 

"You," the woman said, "Are a damned lot of trouble."

"I'll fight you all," Jona replied, "I'll paint the ground with your blood—"

The woman had the _gall_ to laugh, and then she said, "You'll die. And I don't get paid if you're dead. I'm to make a point and deliver a message, so here it is: Sam wants you to get out of Minrathous. Run til there's no more running in you, til you don't _have_ anywhere else you can scarper. He's a sentimental fellow, and he'd have me say you two are even after this. That his debt to you's repaid in full. You saved his life, so now you get to go somewhere else and not interfere."

"Who's Sa—"

But the question died in her throat; one of the men had snuck up behind her, and he held a damp cloth over her mouth and her nose. Hawke choked, tasting noxious fumes, alchemical work, and light sparked behind her eyes, and then there was no more world and no more woman and no more _Sam_.

She thought for a moment she might rest.

And then she thought nothing at all.


	4. Unearned Favor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hawke really hates the Fade, and makes an appeal to Justice's better nature.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Totally cribbing from [Katie's Best Guess At Elvhen Dictionary](http://archiveofourown.org/works/359253) in this chapter. 
> 
> (Now with more Merrill and Fenris.)

Hawke didn't have any air in her lungs.

There was a weight on her chest, on her head, and no air—she tried moving, tried making a fist, but her hands were nowhere, numb, cold, prickling and not. Dark everywhere, pain behind her eyelids—she couldn't move _them_ , either—inside her chest and her belly and a burning in her mouth and throat. 

The alchemist's special. 

A tightness lay down on her throat and she ached for thrashing, _get up, run, breathe again._

Instead, she got stillness. 

_I'm dying._

_I beat the fucking Arishok in single combat, I led the charge against Orsino and Meredith, against the monsters they became, I challenged a high dragon and won and I'm dying like this._

Her face was wet—tears or blood, anyone's guess which, and—

The weight was gone. Hawke sucked in great heaving breaths, rolled onto her side, and retched. Nothing in her belly to get rid of, but the muscles there kept on going. She spat foam and made a sound like a groan, and found she didn't have the strength to move. Hawke's throat was raw, and the inside of her mouth and nose with it. 

"What happened?" she choked, and ended the last words coughing. 

Her limbs were made of lead; her head and eyes were on fire. Hawke cracked one eye, then the other. Blurry dirt and the suggestion of a fire a couple of yards away—the light and heat of one. She blinked. It didn't do a lot of good.

"I could ask you the same question," Anders said, kneeling over her. A spell had kept her still, and another kept her alive while her body figured out what to do. Anders' work. He continued, "A very large, very angry man brought you inside and dropped you on our table. He said something like, 'This belong to anybody here?' And then he left, like he didn't care to find out the answer. So tell me, _Hawke_ , what _did_ happen out there?"

Hawke—a whimper escaped her mouth. She hurt, and Iulius was dead, and the rest of the crew was going to find her and wrap her in chains and throw her in the harbor and—

 _Who was fucking_ Sam _?_

Anders rolled her over, onto her back. Helped her sit up. She'd done the same for any number of her friends following any number of rough nights, too much killing and too much liquor after, in grief and celebration. Her stomach clenched once more, nothing but bile inside, and she swallowed that back. Wished, instantly, that she hadn't.

He leaned her against a barrel. Cloth gathered around her legs. Someone had changed her clothes, wiped down her skin. Anders, probably. Bethany wouldn't have come back. She would be here now if she had. Wouldn't she? Hawke let her head fall against the wood; it cracked hard enough that it would probably raise a goose-egg. 

The questions came, now, again. So many jobs she'd come home concussed, helmet damaged beyond repair and discarded, or lost in a cave somewhere, or pulled off and chucked at an opponent along the Wounded Coast. _Does this hurt, does that, could she move her fingers (no) her toes (no), open-your-eyes-Hawke-shit-you've-really-done-yourself-in-this-time._ She answered with fractional nods and grunts and focused, as best she could, on Anders' hands. They glowed, misted over with his magic. 

He touched her with quick familiarity, moving wrists and elbows, prodding armpits and ribs and stomach, avoiding her ticklish places, except the one over her spleen. She thought it was her spleen. Maybe it was her liver. Quick efficiency with the glands on either side of her crotch, nothing erotic to it, as if she were any other pathetic patient. 

Which, she supposed, she _was_ today. Pathetic. He flattened his palms on the tops of her thighs, moved her knees, her ankles, then command her to move her toes. She couldn't. They were moving but she couldn't tell if _she_ was moving them. And then he went back up. Magic everywhere; she hurt a little less with each pass. 

Those hands were on her throat, now, and she cried out—the pressure of them started the burning up all over again. 

_Fucking alchemists._

"Open your mouth."

She shook head in petulant refusal; her jaw hurt like it had been broken or maybe just popped out of joint, right at the hinge. 

"Seeing as I can't actually _heal_ you if I can't see what's _wrong_ with you, you don't have much of a choice in the matter. You can have a lot of pain now or a lot of pain forever, or you might actually die, _I_ certainly don't know—"

His skin shifted with crackling blue, eyes glowing, voice changing, and he squeezed slightly, in such a way that her mouth opened with naught but the scrape of bone rubbing against bone.

Justice—calmed. Barely beneath Anders' skin, now, eyes glowing blue behind the pale brown of his, muddying them.

A scream tore from her.

"You ass," she whispered, when she next could. "I should have stabbed you when I had the _chance_."

"You have chemical burns all over your mouth and throat," he said. 

His voice was not his voice and the magic that coated her mouth and nose and throat hurt worse than anything she'd known; her flesh resisted it, rejected it; he pulled away from her. Blue. Breaking. 

"Who did this to you?" Anders and Justice together, and Justice alone, no Anders left at all. 

Hawke beat the back of her skull against the barrel four times, hard, and shrugged. She didn't know. 

_I don't know. Come back, come finish, I can't feel the inside of my mouth._ At once her lungs had cotton in them, the healing magic left half-done, and she gasped, clawed the dirt floor, her hands at least working now. 

Black around the edges of her vision, black in the center, a ring of Justice cast double all she could see, and she couldn't even beg. She needed _air_ , she would _die_ , she would die here, today, in a hovel in the Piecework District of Minrathous with a healer at her side, unable to act for his rage. 

"Please," the word escaped her throat, half-formed and slurred. "Justice, let—"

And then the light was gone, and the fire, and the world went black and green and blurred around the edges, and she could speak again, an echo in her own head. 

" _Justice, please, I don't want to die tonight_."

The Fade mirrored the hovel where Hawke's body lay. 

There was nothing of Feynril's temple to it. 

Walls leaned in close, crumbling, glistening wetly; shadows cast by an absent fire danced upon them. Hawke turned, her bearing lost, her hands empty of any weapon. She had no sword, no memory of a sword; she had no shield, but her fists and elbows and teeth would do. Should she need them.

_You've gotten out of worse scrapes alive._

Time did not pass here as it did in the world: an hour might have gone by, or a fraction of a second. Hawke did not think she was dead.

She walked a few steps and the space extended, the edges blurring past her as she moved. She shouted for Justice—for Vengeance, but he did not answer. Most likely, he still held Anders in his thrall. Most likely, Vengeance could not leave the impression Anders' body made upon the veil. 

Merrill had explained it that way, years ago, as the Chantry bell struck the third hour of the morning. They had sat on the floor of her room, backs against her bed, staring up at the eluvian and passing a bottle of very good liquor back and forth. She was no mage herself; she'd never even wished for that kind of power, but got ideas and asked what Merrill called _da'vhen dirtha'vena_ —children's questions. 

"The stupid questions, you mean," she had said, bumping her knee against Merrill's. 

"The kind you ask when you want to learn something you don't know already, yes," she'd replied, taking the bottle and taking a drink. She'd grinned, color high on her cheeks. " _I_ wouldn't call them stupid questions."

" _Per se_."

"You look at curiosity very differently than we do," she had replied, regarding the depths of the eluvian, lost to them both for the moment."Or perhaps not."

Merrill had spoken a lengthy phrase, then, and when Hawke _hmmed_ at her, she had shrugged, and given the bottle back, empty. "'You don't know when to _stop_ , _da'len_.' She said that to me once. Keeper Marethari."

"I believe this requires another bottle of brandy," Hawke had said, and led the way to the Hanged Man.

The short of it then was, aside from the very special cases of the somniari and the well and truly dead, a soul did not stray far from its body. A spirit which wished pursuit of or collaboration with that soul had to circle like a vulture or shark rather than chase like a wolf. Also, the more she learned of Merrill's old Keeper, the less she liked the woman.

So the short of it _tonight_ was, Vengeance had to be around here somewhere. 

_Warehouses are always full of doors when you get to the edges._

She pushed forward, through the thickened mist, away from laughter and the whisperings of the thousand-thousand people she had failed, and reached an end. A—membrane, like a waxy leaf, rather than a true wall. A stopping place. Hawke changed direction and moved alongside it, fingers never leaving the edge, til she found a door. Held her breath and pushed it open. 

The Amell estate was there, decorated for Satinalia. The place smelled of roasted meat and the soup Orana made, seasoned with lemon and cinnamon. No light from outside, but the hearth fires and beeswax candles and a double-handful of wisps glowed enough to see by.

Teryn lay by the entry hearth, looked up at her, tilted his head to the side.

Her insides jumped with the sight of him, with the memory of short, clean fur beneath her hands and a warm, wet tongue on her face, intelligent doggy eyes and a growl that had sent even Tal-Vashoth scrambling to get away. 

The mabari lifted his head, but didn't move. 

The sword and shield she'd brought from Lothering would be in the trunk by her desk, kept safe in case of need. Toys, when you held them up against the Arishok's blade. The rest of the gear, the things she'd gathered and kept and thought to use at some point, those she had sold to Varric for rather more than they were worth, the day she and the others left Kirkwall.

Varric's laughter sounded from the kitchen, and oh—if she could see him again! Her lying dwarf couldn't fix a damned thing that had gone, but she missed him by her side, at her back, his running commentary and the florid descriptions that made her laugh til she wheezed while they tramped through the muck of the underworld.

 _Come play with me,_ Teryn said, _Where did you go? I thought you left forever. I missed you, Hawke, I missed you_ so much _, you're my favorite, my favorite-favorite, why did you_ leave _?_

"I need to find Justice," she said. 

_You're going away again? Why would you go_ away _? I thought you_ loved _me—_

"I do love you," she said. "You went and got old, my friend. Aveline needs veteran help to keep the Guard in line. Now more than ever."

 _I don't_ love _her. Come sit with me. My belly itches and I can't reach it. Please?_

Hawke felt her feet taking her toward the mabari. A nap couldn't hurt, could it? A few moments' rest by the fire, with her hound, before the guests arrived? Time was a flexible thing here, she might only lay down her head, she might only close her eyes. 

"You don't have to be a hero anymore, Jona Hawke," Teryn said.

And he flickered. 

_My sword—_

Was in her hand, and her shield hooked onto her left arm. She crouched, ready to strike, but if she got out the door and closed it she might escape _without_ a fight. 

Teryn rose, and now the shape of his mouth was _wrong_ , was slim, a slit without lips instead of whiskered jowls, graying. The dog stretched, grew, blistered like flatbread thrown into a cooking fire. Hawke's sword and shield may have been made of solid gold, for how her arms ached with their weight.

"It would be so easy, Jona Hawke. Stay here. Stay with us. Kirkwall needs you."

"Look where my choices led Kirkwall," she replied, and a yawn escaped her. "Kirkwall needs someone who can fix my mistakes, and I'm so damned close I can't even _see_ them all."

"Come _feast_ with us," the demon-who-had-been-Teryn said, with a wave of its stubby arm, still tipped in a dog's paw.

Her stomach growled on the suggestion. 

_A meal and a long nap, games and my friends with me and nothing to do but wait for the midnight and light a bowl of whiskey outside the threshold when the bell chimes._

_And later you'll see your people out one-by-one, have a steaming bath. Isabela will be by the library door after everyone else goes home. Or Anders will be in your bedroom, one of the two. What year is it? Slow kisses and sleep and languid, easy sex with the sun well over the eastern horizon, cold creeping in from outside but bodies warm and slick—_

The demon shifted, wavered, and a sound took Hawke's attention to the library door. A woman's naked form coalesced just beyond it. Sloth to wear you down, desire to inflame you to stupid, careless choices. She closed her eyes and calculated hectares of land to sacks of rye seed to tons of grain at harvest-time, a skill leftover from when Malcolm Hawke decided he would be a farmer; a skill she had not required once in ten years, but the silent rote-recital stilled her. 

Desire reminded her of Isabela, with blows and fire and possibility at her command, though they looked not at all alike. This demon was slender and rosy and glossy-horned, with carriage like a coming victory. And Sloth's whine echoed in her skull, sang to her hands and feet, slowed her heart, quieted her lungs. For the first time in a long time, Hawke thought she might not make it out of a fight. 

_Anders, if you're anywhere, now would be a very good time to wrench back control of yourself and_ get me breathing _again—_

Hawke shifted her grip on the sword and lunged forward to the demon she had summoned inadvertently. The one who'd awaited her could wait.

The charge was like wading hip-deep in the Waking Sea, with the pull of the water and unsteady sand beneath your feet, with debris bouncing off your legs and back out with the waves.

Force to start; the blade was dull but she carried her own strength in her heart and head. Finesse could come after. She twisted her body at the last moment, struck the demon with her shield before the creature could speak a word. Slashed into her ribcage before the barrier went up and the shades came out to play. Three of them, and probably more in the wings. 

She always gave the people she fought a chance to back down, to comply, to negotiate. Always, but not tonight. Sam had not given her that favor and no demon had yet taken her up on it. With her lips turning blue and her body's heart slowed from lack of air back in the world, she didn't have the _time_. 

One shade went down with her shield to its chest, quivering into a puddle at her feet—a chance to injure the others, chase them away. Jona sliced and stabbed and danced. Remembered her hands near Fenris's as they moved across the unlit ballroom of his home, bloodied and spent, _we have more pressing matters to attend than Hadriana,_ still heavy between them when the woman had been dead for five months at the time. 

"You aren't as strong as you believe you are," he had said. "You stand your ground where you should retreat, and when you _do_ retreat, it's—"

"It's just one more thing I'm wrong about, isn't it?"

"It's a _skill_ you haven't learned, because you haven't needed to. The Arishok ran you through four times."

"He says as if I don't remember."

"Follow me."

Jona had rolled her eyes and gone, then; now, she placed herself just beyond a shade's maw, one dead and two to go, with a step she had learned that night. She buried her sword in shadowed flesh, which shook like a well-set jam or the inside of a barrel of preserved eels. The body resisted her, but not as real flesh did, and spilled no blood when she withdrew, and skipped back. 

She did not forget but rather put aside that lesson, and ran straight for the demon the second her barrier went down. 

"We'll need a handkerchief, or some other small cloth," Fenris had said. 

Old blood stained the grout between the tiles; shards of glass from broken wine bottles had been swept to the edges of the room but not cleaned up and taken away. Hawke had pulled her hair down, freeing it from the scarf that held it in place, and handed it over. 

"Whatever this is—"

"—Keep one end, and face me. Whenever I move, mirror it yourself."

"I'm not _dancing_ with you," she had said, and the elf had scowled.

"If you would _rather_ die, when you finally meet someone who _does_ overmatch your strength—"

She had made a wordless sound and taken back her end of the scarf. She'd tugged it nearly out of Fenris' hand.

He had raised his free hand, palm flat, and she had done the same. 

"We will not touch," he had said. "This is to help with grace in limited space. Retreat when you have no place to run. Or you could go home."

"If you think I'm giving up that easily, you're dead wrong."

So began the first of many lessons. Hawke with her books and her pens and ink; Fenris with his impossibly light feet and a grace as deadly as his fingers curled around a beating heart. She had stumbled and grumped and gotten better. He had done the same. 

Each time she pulled the scarf, he had said, "Stop, again, it must remain slack."

Jona had mocked his instructions even as she obeyed them, at the time; now she found herself _within_ the Desire demon's new barrier. There was just enough space between them to swing a sword, just enough space for those razor teeth and swollen lips to come down upon her throat. 

_Enough_ space between us, and no more—

She swung, struck, pulled back; the demon retreated to the outer edge of the barrier. A strong spell, strongly cast; this one would need to flicker and die on its own, when it was ready, and no sooner.

"Think of all the _fun_ we could have," the demon said. 

She faltered at the voice, mimicry like a bird's, close but wrong. But she faltered, and her body went all to a different kind of fire, and she almost dropped her sword. 

_Always remember where you are, Hawke._

Hawke feinted right—burning, burning—and lunged straight for the demon, pinning it to the barrier with her sword between its breasts—if it had been a person, the spine would have shattered. 

She gave a little gasp, eyes locked on Hawke's over the hilt of the sword.

The demon looked...surprised.

The barrier fell away, and she was gone, and the shades with her. 

No sweat soaked her clothes, no blood made rivulets down her face and arms; she had no body to injure here, though she might find her death in giving up. She breathed for the feel of air in her lungs, the ghost of that feeling. 

Sloth lay by the fire in its true form, not gnawing the bone in its mouth so much as sucking on it, in every torpid lazy heinous way a parody of her dog, and Hawke burned, still. _No more._ She made her hands relax, made her shoulders loosen, made her breath return to a state of calm. Rage came easily, easily enough that it scared her, and never masked itself in what it was not. She wanted no more visitors tonight, and she was finished with demons at the moment. 

General ones, specific ones, vengeful ones laughing at her from inside her own bedroom, she wanted all of them gone.

Hawke looked up to blue light in the doorway at the top of the stairs and thought, _I will make him regret the day he crawled out of the muck of Amaranthine—_

_But how much work is that, Hawke?_

The sloth-creature lolled its head—not Teryn, never her proud mabari.

"I will chase you to the end of the Fade and the end of the world," she said, walking toward it. "I will dog you til the very thought of another step makes you weep. And when you think I'm done with you, I will fight you until you don't have any fight left in you, do you understand me? You'll spend the rest of your existence running. Leave this place and find some other hole to curl up in. Don't think for a second I won't make good on my promise."

With each word, the sloth demon shrank; with each step, he cowered back, closer to the fire. 

The edges of him singed when he reached the hearthstones, and he whined in Teryn's whine, his body covered now in ruddy fur, shaped _wrong_ , too long in the leg and too narrow in the back and no love at all in the glossy black eyes.

"Do you _understand_ me?" Hawke's voice cracked.

And he was gone, compressed smaller than she knew he could be and sucked upward on the flames, through the chimney, away.

Hawke ascended the stairs, one by one as she always had, except the creaking one halfway up that always woke her mother. Her door hung open still.

"Justice," she said, "It's past time we had a talk."

Malcolm Hawke had been the one who taught her to not wish ill on others. _What if you got what you asked for? How would you feel, then?_

At the time, she and Carver had been screaming at one another, and not a door in the house had gone un-slammed. _I hope an ogre gets you_!

_I haven't thought of that in years._

Her brother would have told her not to put any stock in superstition, that what really mattered was what you did. How you acted. Whose pillow you left a dead fish beneath and how well you denied it.

She didn't remember what the fight had been about—what any of their fights had been about, just that one had ended with the fish incident, and that Malcolm had sat them both down and calmly-calmly- _calmly_ asked them why they hated one another so much. Why they both couldn't act—couldn't _be_ —more like Bethany, who loved everyone and never made a fuss.

In hindsight, that talk had purchased fortnight of peace at her sister's expense. She would tell her if she ever got the chance.

_I know the answer, Carver. We were always too much alike in the wrong ways, and too different in the right ones._

"Justice," she said. "You brought me here. Stop hiding. It's unbecoming."

Hawke had not thought she would ever get to be alone with the spirit, and hadn't planned out all the things she meant to tell him, all the questions she would demand he answer. She would not sing-song her summons like a game of hide-and-seek; she had not played such games in more than twenty years and she wasn't about to start again now, or here. 

An ember burned within her, small and red and oh, it would be so easy if it consumed her. 

Then she would never get out.

Justice would have Anders to himself, she would never face the rest of the crew, she would never chase Sam's identity across Minrathous or drive a sword through his gut like he deserved, after the night she'd had. She would never be caught by the city, never trade freedom for the punishment of bondage or expulsion.

She would never say goodbye to her sister. Never say hello to Varric.

Jona Hawke wrapped the ember in a little clay pot in case she needed it later. She passed the top step and went straight for her room. It was empty: the desk, the trunks and wardrobes, the bed, even the curtains were gone. The floor was covered from wall to wall with leaves of paper—some printed, some handwritten. Some torn, some whole. Some scorched around the edges, others blurred with drops or spills or moldy from too long in the dark and damp.

A few of the pages were stained with blood, others with the fluids of a healer's work. Lyrium on some, the blue liquid oxidized to an unappealing brown.

Anders' manifesto. She picked a crumpled sheet up and smoothed it, read words she had helped to form and phrase. _Imprison mages without cause, so that they may be used as soldiers in the case of need_ —

That was from a later draft, only a couple of years old. A real complaint of actual harm done. A wrong they might have taken before the Chantry—women like Elthina would have listened; a thoughtful Divine would have heard them out. 

If they had ever had such a chance. If he had seen fit to trust her at all in that last year, despite Orsino and Meredith's backbiting and Hawke caught between them. Their errands—Meredith's errands—had always borne the weight a threat—what could be done to Merrill; to Anders; to Bethany, kept so close. 

They'd had more leverage than they ever could have needed.

And she and Anders…had what they had, now.

Hawke started when a voice, Justice's voice, sounded and echoed in the chamber.

"You think you would have given your life for any of them, but you're standing _here_."

In his natural state, Justice was—gaunt. Translucent, even corpse-like, blue but polluted with flecks of crimson and black near his extremities. A dark patch where a man's heart might have been. 

"Do not pretend the chaos in the world was not directly caused by what _you_ egged him on to do."

The spirit did not laugh; he had no humor. He floated around Hawke, and around her again, forcing her to turn in place to keep him in her line of sight. 

She held the paper out to him, and he consumed it. It...ceased to be, absorbed. Gone.

"Do not wash your hands of the needless death _you've_ caused." Justice swelled even as he made the accusation.

"When have I ever denied my failures?"

"You are here," Justice replied, "You distract him from his purpose, bind him from righteousness, you are a _shackle around my neck_!"

"And _you_ are as much a prison to him as the Circle ever was!"

" _He never had such a thought before we met you._ "

"But he _has_ asked you to leave since then, and _you_ have refused him. You won't go. You won't do whatever it is spirits _do_ when they come off their extended holidays in the world, you won't leave Anders to _himself_. You think he would have chosen the path he did if not for you? If he didn't have you whispering in his ear, compelling him—"

"—You are no different in that regard."

"I _regret_ when good men die because of me. I hurt when they hurt, I do my best to right the wrongs I commit. A good man _is_ dead because of me, and _you_ are keeping me from bringing peace to his family—"

"Do not think for a moment you deceive me."

"I made the stupid choice to walk home instead of renting a room where I was, and my _friend_ took an arrow to the throat for it. I am the _only_ other person who was there, and I am the _only_ person who can find the man who gave the order and—"

And the ember flared within its little pot; she couldn't give over to anger, here. To sorrow. Too much depended on her calm, on her seeing what needed doing and _doing_.

Hawke picked up another page. 

She knew the scribbles and ink blots on this one by heart.

Deep winter, three years ago: their first one together in the house. Anders had climbed from bed with the bedclothes gathered around his waist, and dug around her desk for a pen and ink til she woke up and told him where they were. He'd spent more than hour bent over the pages, murmuring under his breath, while she lay on her side, watching him. 

For over an hour.

While gooseflesh raised on her skin and the fire in the hearth finally guttered and died.

_There is a beautiful, naked woman freezing her tits off twelve feet from where you're sitting, love._

_What did you call me?_

_Love._

That had been a good winter.

She read, "The prohibition of certain States by the Law of Faith misses the entire point that what you actually mean to prohibit are harmful _actions_. A mage's being is no more a crime than an ordinary man's, and the punishment of that State is inherently immoral. It doesn't stop being immoral just because you've _sanctioned_ it."

"They are my words, roughened by the strength of his emotion," Justice said. "They are our words, truth for a world sorely lacking in that—"

"Tell me something," Hawke said. "Tell me the _truth_."

She dropped the page, and it seemed to meld into the rest of the shifting mass on the floor. 

Justice said, "I am incapable of lies."

"I don't believe you, but I'll take you at your word. _Can_ you leave Anders' body?"

"I could return to the Fade, if I chose. I would not exist in the form you know, afterward. I would—Mortal beings do not understand the process. I would cease, and then I might cease cessation."

Walking seemed the thing to do, to answer that. Let it sink in, permeate her thoughts. 

It sounded like dying. Each step she took around the perimeter of the room, forcing Justice to turn in place now, disturbed the manifesto. With each step the paper sea grew a few pages deeper, soft and yet resistant beneath her feet.

She could raise her sword and hack her way out if she needed to.

She had no idea how she'd get out of the _Fade_ without help, if she did away with Justice and escaped the room.

Instead, Hawke kept going. "And if Anders dies in the world?"

"The same would occur."

"If I die here," she said, "it will kill him. It will kill him slowly, and he will be useless to you while he does it. Look at me. Release him for the night. I _can_ lie and I choose not to—the Anders you know today is not the man you met twelve years ago. Even if _you_ would suicide over principle, over the chance to get one in at me, he does _not_ deserve to die over your stubbornness."

She knelt, now, and sifted through all the years of work at her feet. And she read.

"The two dearest rights of man are his autonomy and his self-determination. Your fear has stolen both."

Hawke put that page aside, and found another. Burnt. 

"If man must not serve magic, then neither may he serve the _fear_ of magic, the desire for a power he lacks."

She tore through sheet after sheet, reading aloud the words Justice himself had informed, the words Anders had spilled in blood and ink. The ideas the two of them—the three, were she honest, and tonight she was not—had debated over games of chess and backgammon cold drinks out on the balcony on hot, sticky evenings. 

With each word, she glared up at Justice, looked into empty pits instead of eyes, and with each word, her hands grew heavier and the space between her ears softer, gauzier. 

Time passes differently in the Fade than it does in the world, but it _passes_.

Hawke didn't think she could stand if an army of demons came charging through the front door in Templar armor, led by corrupted visage of Meredith Stannard herself. 

Her throat ached from argument. She shouldn't _feel_ here.

"His autonomy is his—is—Justice, you fucking hypocrite, let him _go_ —!"

Hands.

Cold hands. On her throat. Cold, wet air in her nose.

"Please, Hawke, please, now is _not the time_ —I swear I'll—I promise—"

Lips on her mouth, fingers callused from years wielding a staff closed around her nose.

And _air_ , blessed air, in her lungs.

Hawke—her body convulsed; her muscles contracted, cramped. She pulled away and, for the second time today, refilled her lungs with greed. Dirt stuck to her face, had got into her eyes, and none of that mattered—she could deal with the discomfort of being alive because it meant she was _alive_ —.

Same hands on her face, when the shuddering stopped. She opened her eyes and found Anders beside her, over her, with his warm brown eyes and his gentle hands and when she tried to sit, he pushed her back down again. She lay with her head and shoulders on his lap, while he stroked her face and hair and begged her not to go to sleep, to stay with him, to please, please stay.

"I'm not going anywhere," she said, the words like gravel in her throat. 


	5. Fault Lines

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hawke willed away the dread that _this_ choice would be the one that brought them all to ruin.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for _even more_ Google translate Latin. As always, hover for a translation and pray you didn't study Latin even one day longer than I did.  (The best part about cribbing from ancient Rome is that there's so _much_ material to steal.)
> 
> Warning for Kirkwall, and the emotional consequences of Kirkwall finally catching up to Our Heroes. Hawke & Company have a whole lot of PTSD that they're not handling all that well. Tread lightly if you need to.

Jona had no recollection of the days that followed.

She alternated the dreamless sleep of the exhausted with fierce nightmares, Justice in her mother's shattered corpse, holding Leandra fast inside that corrupted vessel. 

Sometimes she woke enough to accept a thin broth with bay and honey and garum. Most times she did not remember the food or drink or the stumbling steps she took to the privy. She thought she might sweat out every drop of water in her body, and she remembered Anders _fretting_ over that. _You_ must _drink, my love_. 

"Is this you?" Jona asked, once, on the fourth day. 

Her head felt like someone had stuffed fresh-picked cotton between her brain and her skull, seeds sticking every which way and fibers dulling her ability to _think_.

"There's a spell to make you sleep, yes," he replied. "The rest is recovery from your encounter. Whatever burned your throat also affected your nerves."

"Oh, well, that's just wonderful," she said. There wasn't any venom in it.

Jona insisted on lifting the cup of soup to her mouth on her own, this morning, and some of it dribbled down her chin. She set the cup aside and wiped the drips on her sleeve, soiled from simply being in their hideaway so long. Piecework and Lowtown were squabbling sisters, more alike than either would admit, and this part of the undercity hadn't any more ambiance than Darktown boasted on its very best day. 

_Things_ —Jona did not dwell on what kind, though she knew that _living_ and _crawling_ would describe them—crept up the dripping walls in an ever-shifting carpet. 

_I hate this_ , she thought, and she said, "Lift the spell, please. I'll finish getting better on my own."

"I'd rather you stay under for another few days."

"And with every day I'm not at my best, Sam will get harder to find."

"I'm sorry, who?"

She reeled the story back, then: the deal and the celebration and Ennio, the chase and the pursuers smarter than she was. The woman who took advantage of her newness to the city and Iulius' panicked fear for his family and the drunken veil of bad decisions both of them had worn.

When she finished, her eyes were falling shut on their own and she was shivering with a violence she hadn't seen since Wesley Vallen lay Blight-sick and dying on the ground outside of Lothering.

They had to find Sam, she told him, again and again. They had to. They had to find Bethany, they had to get out of the city. She had to find Flavia, to tell the woman she'd paid the porter for her husband, the only thing she could have done. Marco would go to Iulius' boss, and the men who kept them all in work would surely—

Anders shushed her, helped her lie back down onto the pallet. Soothing magic sank into her flesh. No burning now, though her throat still ached with a pinching pain and her voice was rough from lack of use and, probably, the damage the alchemist had done her. 

She pulled her arms close to her sides at the chill the magic brought, tucked her chin against her chest. Soon enough Anders was behind her, warm and solid, his arms wrapped around her with her head tucked beneath his chin. 

_With Justice somewhere else, licking his wounds._

It was not the most pleasant of thoughts to ease you into sleep, but it was the one she had. 

A week after her encounter with the— _enforcer_ , she decided—Jona felt very nearly human. The woman had not come to _kill_ _her_ , otherwise she would have done just that. She'd had more than adequate chance. 

She sat up for several hours, ate bread and drank broth and talked out a plan until she could make no sound at all. _Tomorrow_ , she scratched into the dust between herself and Anders. _Tomorrow, we find Bethany. Ennio. Sam._

"Absolutely not," Anders said. "You aren't anything close to healed up, yet."

"We don't have time to wait on healing," Jona said. Every word after _we don't_ came out a discordant squeak. 

She folded her arms across her chest and looked up at him, glaring; they had wasted enough time waiting already and if Anders wouldn't go with her she would go herself, alone. Jona pointed to the word _tomorrow_ beside them, and gave a firm nod.

"Whether you—" She swallowed and took a long pull from their shared waterskin, to lubricate her abused vocal cords. "—like it or not."

"We'll see how you feel in the morning."

Jona rolled her eyes and made a rude gesture. 

"Ah, yes, the Hawke I fell in love with. Always running headlong into dangers she's ill-equipped to face, half the time alone and the rest of the time—"

She brushed away the words she'd written, and replaced them with, _Turns his mock on me!_ Then she pointed to them, and to her throat, both brows raised.

  
  


In the morning, her voice had come back—somewhat, anyway—and Jona could walk without wobbling. She wished she had her armor, the good set she'd spent years assembling, the breastplate she'd taken from the high dragon's hoard. 

The rusting mail shirt she found among the things Anders had brought with them from the inn would have to do. She didn't know if the links would hold against a slice, let alone a stab. The Arishok's sword was much heavier than she remembered, as was her shield, and she wondered at the chances of Minrathous' guard wanting to know how such a base-born woman came across weapons as fine as these.

Some things you couldn't help.

"Bethany first," Jona said. 

She freed the sword from the scabbard and held it at guard, two-handed like a great sword. It was presently too heavy to weild without that extra support, and she'd never been over-skilled at this style of fighting, but. It would have to do. Like everything else. Jona's heartbeat roared in her ears, excitement for the day ahead or the remnants of her convalescence, she couldn't say which. Probably a bit of each.

"I would rather you spend another day lying _down_ ," Anders told her. 

"I know. I plan on completely ignoring your advice as a healer and probably paying for it ten times over later."

He grumbled, but he dished out their breakfast. Today there was porridge with a little salt pork instead of broth and vinegar-in-water with the remains of an astringent cleansing spell to drink. 

She was reminded of every hangover she'd ever had in the Hanged Man, of Varric with his thumbs digging into his temples, of Isabela talking too loudly between them. 

"You're going to put yourself into an early grave through sheer, bloody-minded _neglect_ ," Anders muttered. 

"Yes, probably," she said.

He did not say much after that.

But he followed her out with his staff in hand when they were done and she was was glad, so glad, that she still had enough in her to inspire that much cooperation. 

Minrathous thrummed around them, with the business of living and the work of the day ahead.

 _Find Bethany_ , she thought, and turned them toward Center City.

For a while outside of Piecework, the buildings grew taller and the gates and gardens grander. Traffic in the brick-paved streets was made of silk-canopied sedans and fine horseflesh with finer riders. The two of them kept to the side, _Anders_ lending them the credibility of a working mage her sword the promise that whatever work he did was important enough to warrant a bodyguard. 

She caught and understood pieces of conversation, shifting inflections, the roots of action and person and thing. How they fitted together was all a-jumble again.

The air was weighted with the scent of climbing jasmine and day-birds' song. Caged parrots screeching, children shrieking in their games behind the high white walls. A dracolisk the size of a large dog paced and hissed behind one gate when they passed, and she looked up in case it might leap its enclosure. Trumpet-blossom vines and a purple-leaved ivy twined around the wrought iron spikes pointing inward toward the villa. 

A guarding creature to keep the unwanted out and the promise of being impaled to keep the guardian in.

Jona shuddered, imagining those spiked teeth sinking into her calf and dragging her away. She put the thought from her head and walked a little faster, breathed in quick, shallow pants.

Then the buildings and their walls shrank, replaced with structures of whitewashed wood, and then plain board with the smell of industry and the harsh ringing clangor of hammer on burning-red metal on anvil and the hiss of quenched steel. 

She stopped an elf carrying a stack of tins, each filled with a different sort of food, for delivery to the forges.

"We're looking for the Fifth Iron off Broad Street," she said, and he shook his head, replied Tevene. 

"Anders?"

"Don't look at _me_."

"I really have no idea how to begin—"

Anders sighed, looked from her to the man, and held up one finger for a pause while he worked out bits of twenty-year-old grammar they both knew he hadn't ever learned that well to begin with. 

At last, he pointed to Hawke and said, "Sororae." Then he touched each of his eyes ( _we're looking_ ), and held up five fingers and pointed to the head of his staff, worked in iron. "Via Magnus? Magnus Platea? No? Oh, oh! "Ubi! Ubi Qunitus Ferrii? In Via Magnus?"

The man sighed, shaking his head and muttering some doubtlessly scathing thing about foreigners. He pointed to a couple of dishes in the middle of his stack, and to them— _going there anyway, why not take you two along, eh?_ And then he tapped his palm, because of course, of course you tipped your guide. 

Hawke produced a sovereign and handed it over. 

The man grinned, jerked his head forward, and wove them through carts of ore and ingots, finished works wrapped in cloth, strings of horses here for new shoes and people with baskets full of swaddled glass-work strapped to their backs. Twelve men moved very slowly down the middle of the road, each with part of the edge of a very large veridium-glazed ceramic tortoise in hand, while a thirteenth directed them with shouted scolds. 

She had been to Bethany's forge once, and recognized the sign above the entry: an anvil topped with five bars of iron stacked up in a pyramid. Their guide shouted over the hammering and the heat inside, " _Age! Age! En! En! En! Septimus, Aulus, merenda!_ "

Jona left him to finding his customers, and tried to move through the forge like she belonged there. At each station two mages worked beside a smith, turning raw metal into poured ingots or hammered sheets of plate. One mage kept the fire going and shifted hot metal around, another set spells into material and handed it off to a man or woman with mold or hammer and anvil.

All wore leather over their clothes, woolen tunic and trousers that wouldn't burn as fast or as hot as linen, and all had great pools of sweat down their fronts and backs and beneath their arms. 

A faintness fluttered behind Hawke's eyes, and she took Anders by the arm to steady herself. He made a questioning noise drowned out by the din, and she shook her head. She would be fine. She would be fine once she found her sister.

Most of the twenty sets of workers here were so intent upon that work they didn't notice the visitors, which suited Hawke just fine. She led the way past station after station, while her hair went limp from the heat and the sweat pouring from her scalp. Ash and metallic dust settled onto her skin and stuck there, marking her visit to this place. 

Bethany, in the end, saw her first. 

She spoke a string of Tevene and gave her crucible and tongs to another mage, stripped her leather gloves from her hands and stalked down to the center aisle.

And she _slapped_ Hawke, open-palmed, across her cheek. 

The surprise of the blow, rather than the force of it, sent her reeling backward. Anders caught her, so that she didn't tumble onto her backside in the middle of the forge—but it was a near thing.

"What are you _doing_ here?" Bethany hissed. "Where have you been? You disappeared! You were nowhere, you didn't even leave a _note_ , you just cleared out and—!"

Hawke and Anders spoke at once.

"I left a note!"

"I know what being _hunted_ looks like, Bethany!"

"We are not doing this _here_ ," Bethany said. 

She grabbed Hawke by the elbow and tore them through the forge. Mages and smiths paused their work to look at the three of them, and a wave of quiet went with them as they passed, followed by the din of the return to work. The sun beat down upon them in the narrow alley behind the building. 

Bethany took them to a sheltered nook, between stacked cords of wood and a slag heap. "Marco came looking for you last week; he said that Iulius had been killed and robbed and no one could _find_ you and—"

She shoved Hawke back, into the wall; Hawke hit the building with a weary weight.

Bethany was right, of course. In a way, when you cocked your head and faced it from the side.

Anders murmured, "I was with her. I couldn't leave her alone. She could hardly breathe on her own the entire time she was down." 

"—I thought someone had—had taken you, or worse! I'm just—just _furious_ , do you see that? I could freeze you on the spot! After what happened to mother, I—don't you _ever_ do this to me again!"

Bethany shuddered, and Jona took her sister in her arms, put her chin in the crook of her neck and shushed her, told her not to cry, not today, everything would be all right again. She couldn't have said how long they stood that way, tears streaking the soot on Bethany's face and Jona's arms to tight around ribs, breath uneven and nonsense words muffled in Bethany's singed hair. 

It would not be enough, it could never be. She should have had a home with tiny, tidy kitchen in Lothering and a husband and a family now. Bethany should have been sitting on her worktable in stocking feet, a bowl in her hands and laughter all around them. Carver on his way but perpetually late; their mother in the garden and their father telling Leandra that _Jona had set her tomatoes perfectly well, would you go inside already, please?_

She allowed herself one sob, then sniffled back all of that regret and swallowed it.

They had things that needed doing.

"Iulius was killed to send a message to me. Someone is trying to run me out of Minrathous, but he don't want to the city to know what he's up to, or he would have just pointed the guard to me. I need you. I'm going after him and I need you at my side."

"How long?"

"I don't know."

"Let me go speak with Letty. She can usually talk Titus into—it doesn't matter. Stay here."

  
  


The three of them went from Center City down to Dockside, Bethany on her right and Anders on her left. Neither of the mages spoke to the other. After the first couple of snap-back attempts, Hawke stopped trying to convince either of them that forgiveness was the better part of valor. 

If Marco was the new head of the crew, the new shark, then he'd be down in the Cracked Cup finishing up the business Iulius had left undone. And Ennio was one piece of that business. The things Ennio knew, the things that would lead her to Sam. 

She had a couple of tacks she could take. Hawke might tell the truth and hope it was believed. She might appeal to Marco's compassion; she was new, but she had worked with integrity and they'd drawn her into their lives and their families. She'd fit with hem. 

She might lie. 

Hawke was a terrible liar.

Small-time merchants and pawnbrokers hawked their goods and and their services at the tops of their voices in the day-market. Men and women haggled and insulted and turned away and came back in four different tongues, six different kinds of Tevene. Afternoon smelled of iodine and rotting fish. Sweat and tar and water and cooking meat.

Clouds of flies swarmed the pilings and gulls bickered overhead, winging down and picking at dropped food or trying to snatch an afternoon meal out of hand. 

She _recognized_ people in this crowd. Some moved aside for her, others called out to her. Hawke was no Champion here, but she was _known_. She waved greeting to a few but didn't stop to speak with anyone.

Hawke stated her business to the house, and went to the same room she'd been shown a week ago, where Marco was just now kissing the cheek of one of Iulius' associates, making the man his own. It took a moment before he noticed her. 

" _Dominus et Fortuna!_ " he said, standing sharply. 

Decima was there behind him, and _she_ glared at Hawke and her people. 

"Hawke, we thought—shit, _you_ were with him last, what happened?" 

Marco hesitated a moment, and then he crossed the room and greeted her with a kiss on each cheek. 

So they were still friends, still family, for now. 

He invited all three to sit, and Jona made quick introduction. Marco offered watered wine to smooth the explanation he required.

He would do at least as well as Iulius had. Another scoundrel and another good man. For now.

She told the bulk of the truth. Didn't mention the money she'd taken when she thought she might run fast enough that night, but the rest came out. She told the pieces of Kirkwall she'd kept to herself; she told the attack; she told the name _Sam_ and his hirelings and days she'd spent inchoate. She left out Justice and the room full of stained paper, words written out in ink and blood.

Bethany translated for her, where Marco's common tongue failed them and Jona's Tevene hung out of reach. Anders, well. Anders had blue in his eyes, and Decima watched him like she wouldn't hesitate turning him to stone if she had to. Like she had a mind to drive the blade of her staff through his chest as a precaution. But there wasn't anything she could do about Decima _now_.

Jona spoke of Ennio, and Iulius' invitation, and the need for quick action if they meant to find their quarry.

And Marco listened. 

He listened with his hands folded before him, with the way he watched them shifting between Hawke and Bethany and Anders, with his back straight and his eyes rimmed in red and the absence of a friend like a mantle on his shoulders. 

When she finished, he kept listening, kept _considering_ , and the only sound was what filtered in from the taproom. Glasses put down and ale poured and the laughter of those who had not lost anything today. 

At last, he said, "Ennio's youngest sister is to be married four days from now. He'll speak to us then, and he won't dare invite any trouble. "

  
  


In the end, Marco put them up at the Cup. 

Two rooms on the second floor, with a view of the water and a quartet of guards outside. They weren't men Jona knew; Iulius hadn't mingled his crews, in favor of building strengthening the ties of camaraderie within individual groups, and these men watched her with narrowed eyes.

They would trail after any of them who left on errands or other business, but Marco told them it was safer to stay put. At least until they found the bastard who gave the order and paid the death-price.

"We are prisoners, here," Justice said, when the door had shut behind them and Jona had settled on the edge of the bed. 

She hadn't even done anything and already she felt she could sleep another year.

Bethany leaned back against the door, her arms crossed over her chest, and scowling.

"Yes, sister-mine, please explain how this was all _entirely planned_."

Jona slid off the bed, so she sat on the floor with her knees drawn up to her chest. She picked at a hangnail while she thought of the right thing to say, decided that there was no such thing, and charged in.

"I knew it was a possibility when I decided to come, yes," she said.

"That doesn't actually make it any better, but I'm glad you were at least _informed_ ," Bethany replied, rolling her eyes. She'd got sharp, these last weeks. What had happened to her, when Hawke wasn't looking?

She wished she had the time to find out.

"I wanted to leave Minrathous on my terms, all right? I wanted to get out of here without any of my friends dying because of me, and every second I stay in this city I put you two in greater danger! You heard what I said to Marco, what makes you think Sam won't make a _point_ out of you, too?"

" _Yet you delay_ —" Justice began.

"Yes, I _delay_ , because I'd rather find the smart way into this fight than the one that gets a lot of innocent people _killed_!"

"And on that note," Bethany said, "I'm going back to the forge. If Big and Bigger want to follow me there, that's on them. Letty will probably have them hauling ore before the day's out."

She followed Bethany from the room, and they parted ways at the base of the stairs. Bethany hugged her there, and said, "Whatever happens," before she left. Jona squeezed her once and then released her, before she headed to the courtyard.

The Cracked Cup was built up in a horseshoe, facing the water. One side of the horseshoe was broken off from the main building in a narrow alley, disguised with a arch of climbing jasmine in full flower. A curl of smoke rose from the first third of this long structure, made of gold-veined white marble rather than wood. 

Jona had come to love the public baths here, and had had occasion to visit a private bath or two as well. She could hardly _think_ with the air and water draping around her like cloth, so hot her brains might melt out her ears. The attendant just inside asked if she meant to be long— _I must look like an urchin._ —and she told him she planned to take at least an hour, perhaps longer. 

This time of day, the place was nearly empty. It was small but as gloriously made inside as out. Magic had been worked into the stone as it was cut, and light oozed from the walls with the beads of water gathered there.

She stripped down and left her shoes and clothes on one of the glossy hardwood shelves, ranged along one wall, and left the vestibule for the _caldarium_. The pool took up nearly the entire floor, six feet deep and filled with gently circulating, steaming water. Jona eased herself in one inch at a time. Sweat rose on her face and neck and breasts, her scalp, beneath her arms. She treaded water; soot and dirt and blood sloughed from her skin, and for a little while she may have slept. She wasn't sure. 

Wasn't sure how much she trusted Marco, either. Decima blamed her for what had gone; she'd worn her feeling clear on her face. But Marco? He seemed to understand that sometimes, in this business, people died. _Friends_ died. And he _seemed_ , for the time being, pleased to have her back.

Possibly because he intended to _enjoy_ killing her, though she'd assumed him more artful than that. 

The problem with him was that he lied, as they all lied. Part and parcel running with confidence artists, smugglers, and thieves. _Varric_ was different from the people she'd made her own here—he lied because he _told stories_ , and she by turn knew without difficulty when he was _truthing_ her. Marco? Marco lied for advantage, and he took great pleasure from it; Iulius had, too, sometimes. When the falsehood had been crafted well. 

Iulius had preferred honesty where he could afford being honest.

The lie at hand now was her safety, Bethany's, Anders'. 

For the next few days whatever belief in Marco's better nature she had would have to be enough. Until they met Ennio, until they met Sam, until they took their satisfaction against the death order on one of theirs. 

Whatever Marco did afterward, whatever course he put her on: she would face that when she had to. 

Jona emerged from the pool with water-wrinkled fingers and more troubles than she'd had when she got in. The next room, the _tepidarium,_ was larger with a smaller pool. More attendants here, and a couple of the Cup's other guests laid out on marble platforms, being rubbed down with oil. 

She accepted a cup of chilled water, flavored with vinegar, mint, and shredded melon rind. Light streamed down from holes cut in the roof, diffused and softened by the magical barrier against rain and leaves and birds. 

_I knew this place was_ nice _, but..._ You could tell the caliber of a place from its bath-house, and she'd underestimated this one. And with the place, Marco, and Iulius, and the man _they_ worked for. How many rungs away from the Magisterium was _he_?

_What have I gotten us all into?_

A handful of men and women lounged in the pool, talking amongst themselves. Their Tevene was rapid and strangely accented; Jona ignored them while she scrubbed down with a sea sponge and a bar of translucent sugar-soap. The water, just barely warmer than a body at rest, swirled around her and struck her and the walls in tiny waves. 

She heaved herself out sooner than she would've if she'd been alone, and skipped the ice-dip in the next room in favor of soft, loose-woven linen drying sheet. Someone had laundered and dried her clothes, and wrapped them in a tidy bundle with braided cord and a rosemary branch. 

_When was the last time you wore clean clothes? Really, really_ clean _clothes?_

She knew the answer: a week after they'd left Kirkwall, when she pulled on the last shirt she'd brought from her wardrobe back home. Ever since laundry had happened in creeks and springs and been hired out to a Piecework laundress. Sometimes it came back dry, sometimes with some still in the fibers; most often it came back moderately less gray and smelling faintly of mildew, but it was cheap and she wasn't in much of a position to complain. 

Anders and Justice were gone from their room when she returned, and only one guard stood watch. A second guard appeared from around a corner—the one who'd followed her down to the bath. She bid them both a pleasant afternoon before she settled in for what she considered a well-earned nap. 

So long as they were stuck here, Jona decided, she may as well enjoy the stay.

She did not quite believe that resolution, but she could make a good showing none the less.

  
  


Hawke dreamed in fits. Mercenaries descending the walls like spiders, Carver with them, Carver charging ahead and then gone; the Arishok and Danarius and Castillon and her mother, circling the parlor table with paper-thin ceramic cups held between their fingers. Leandra looking as she always had, save the dead glaze over her eyes and the stitches around her throat in sickening parody of a ribbon and drop. 

Ser Alrik's voice drifting past her, with Merrill and Anders and Bethany trailing behind the sound like ducklings; the ship's hold out of Gwaren, Aveline with full eyes but shedding not one tear. Varric brushing by her and not _knowing_ her, his skin radiating red, shedding a trail of red dust behind him. 

DuPuis and Emeric and all their mistakes had cost her, all the wrong trails their misapprehensions had set. 

Poisoned air in Lowtown and the people she had known, had treated with and traded with and laughed and diced with and their children, their fathers and mothers. She dreamed of them and bloody scratch-marks on their faces where they'd clawed away their own skin, of a boy, no more than sixteen, weeping over the infant he had smothered, _my son, my son, my son,_ and begging her to make it stop, _please, Hawke, please make it stop_. 

Alchemy filling her mouth, poison in her lungs, the wet cloth tied over her face no filter at all. 

She dreamed of Minrathous, Iulius surrounding her like the room was full of mirrors. Of messengers just missed, of letters burned and taken on the wind. Heat on her skin, ash ground into her pores, a farce of a trial and her flesh for sale on a pedestal: her sister's, Anders', and Fenris _laughing_ at them all. _You chose Tevinter, Hawke_. Iron chains around her ankles and garlands of limestone wrapped around her hips and neck and draped over her shoulders as Decima pushed her off the end of a pier, water in her lungs and if she breathed there might be _peace_ —

Light touched her eyes, and a shudder passed through her, no water around her and only an overstuffed mattress and soft blankets beneath. Hawke jerked awake, pulse up and breath ragged. She pulled air into her lungs and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. A cold sweat had gathered on her face and neck. 

The guards talked in low voices on the other side of the door. Anders sat beside the round mosaic-tiled table, next to the window, with a cold supper set but uneaten. He had a book in his lap but he was watching _her_.

The sound that left Hawke's mouth might best have been described as a _sob_. 

"Nightmares?"

She didn't speak until she was sure she could keep her voice even.

"You might say that."

"I should have woken you. You looked—."He shook his head.

"I'm perfectly _well_."

Anders raised a brow, and closed the book. He said, "You've started emulating _me_ , you know."

Hawke leaned back against the headboard, face tilted up, eyes closed. She laughed, once. "Have I, now?"

She wrapped her arms around herself, rubbed her hands over the gooseflesh that had raised on her skin. Willed her heart calm, her breath steady. Willed away the dread that this choice would be the one that brought them all to ruin. 

She did not have the luxury of being like Anders. Scattered and impassioned and heedless and brilliant. She did not have the time for following any change she wrought here through until the end. 

Hawke's eyelids were thick and heavy, and when she felt the sweet-rushes and cattails in the mattress shift beside her, she breathed out in a shudder. Anders peeled her hands from her ribcage and held them between his, over-warm. 

She lowered her face and opened her eyes. His hair was damp and unbound, his beard trimmed. Hawke leaned forward so their foreheads touched, and closed her eyes again. 

The kiss came from both of them. She curled her fingers inside his, parted her lips in welcome. The air did not crack with his magic, and the sunlight striping the floor shifted only by the barest margin. Mingled warmth and mingled breath and uncertainty, abeyance while other people acted. She had not counted the days since they'd last touched. In the year before their flight that touch had come scarcely at all. 

Air in her lungs was like ground glass, the curl in her gut like a fist, an impact, a knife between her ribs. Hawke pulled away, and he followed her this time. Knelt over her with his knees on either side of her hips. Eyes wide and brown and lovely. 

She freed her hands and finger-combed his hair, back and away from his face. Tucked the strands of it behind his ears. She couldn't look at him for what she knew she had to say, and so she spoke between the kisses she lay over his jaw and behind his ear. 

"I'm sorry, I should have listened. I always should have listened, even when you weren't speaking, especially then. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I—just—just _take_ me," she said. "I don't have anything else I can give."

Anders shook his head in emphatic denial. 

"We are," he said, "Very good at crisis. And not much else.”

That drew a soft laugh from her. Hawke couldn't help but agree.

He kissed her again, this time deeper, this time insistent, this time eager as the day she had invited him into her home and her bed and the intimate parts of her life. 

He'd wanted so much to love her then. 

She pulled him closer, wrapping him in her arms and legs and all the parts of her that had gone tangled and knotted in the last two years, all the parts that might still need to be cut out or ripped free. The bedclothes, bunched beneath them, were kicked away. 

Clothing shed. Breath shared.

The sun, outside, went down.


End file.
